'Beat Saber' Is The Best Fitness Game I've Ever Played, One Of The Best Games I've Ever Played

There are, I suppose, other games on my Beat Saber machine. Fruit Ninja seems cool, and there's some sort of stealth kayak thing I'ver heard people talk about. Maybe a boxing thing, maybe some stuff with guns: sure. I've heard that VR is a whole medium, and even one that I've spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the past. Oh well. At the moment, I can't think of any of that. Every time I boot up my Oculus Quest I see that there's a store tab that I should check out, maybe one day. Not today. Beat Saber awaits.

Beat Saber has become the defining game of modern VR for me and many others, one of the few true success stories coming out of the still-early platform. It's a premise so simple it really couldn't have happened anywhere else: you have two lightbeatsabers, one red and one blue. Colored blocks fly towards you with a direction on them: you have to cut the block with the saber of the correct color from the correct direction. And, as is pretty central to the whole idea, you have to do so in time with the music: and away we go. I meant to write something about this a while ago, but I had to play an absolute ton of Beat Saber first.

You get from this game what you put into it, and few other games will quite prepare you an experience like this. What starts as a simple exercise in the satisfaction of slashing something in VR ramps up at lightning speed until you're doing elaborate, whirling moves that long ago lost their connection to any lightsabery source material. A sword is a sort of visual language that a gamer understands, but it becomes immediately obvious that what you're doing here is dancing, not fighting. It's the sort of game nobody really imagined when they first started talking about VR, and the sort of game that feels like it's going to define the platform going forward. It doesn't ask you to immerse yourself in the uncanny valley or attempt to pretend that you're flying a vomitous spaceship. It justs asks you to dance, and boy, do you dance.

Beat Saber does that amazing thing that you don't encounter often in life: it's a little like learning a new instrument or maybe learning a new language. When you first look at the higher difficulties they appear as completely impenetrable, just semi-random masses of blocks that you can't ever hope to pull apart into actual moves. And then the magic of it: you do. Maybe you have to slow things down to figure out what's going on and maybe you need to play a little while on a lower difficulty until certain moves become second nature, but I've been amazed at how my brain and body have been able to pull this thing apart until even the hardest songs on the highest difficulty just start to make a certain kind of sense, where even seeing a big cross for my left hand on the right side of the screen doesn't cause me to freeze up anymore. A video game hasn't asked me to learn a new skill like this for a long time, and I'm so glad I did it.

And that's where the fitness starts to come in, particularly as you're swinging both hands in huge, dramatic gestures to something like Imagine Dragons' Radioactive: I've never been much for fitness games overall because I'd rather just go to the gym or something, but I do happen to love games, full stop. And Beat Saber never really feels like a fitness game so much as a game that happens to be intensely tiring. I'm sweating half of the time I'm working these days because I'm dipping down to the kitchen--the largest open area in my house--to get in a song or two before I go back to the office. My arms and back were killing me the first few days I played, but now I've got new muscles in places I didn't know I needed them.

The game has a neat little trick to hammer this point home: your score doesn't just depend on accuracy, though you obviously need that. You get extra points for the distance your saber travels before and after a cut, which in a simple way translates to more rewards for more drama. You can flick your wrists around and try to maximize your speed, sure, but I prefer to really start swinging and try to earn those points with the biggest moves I possibly can: I've spent most of my time playing the Imagine Dragons music pack, because something about that overblown arena rock just works so well with those big sweeping cuts. You may have heard these songs before, but Beat Saber lets you feel them.

Beat Saber doesn't come from nowhere: rhythm games are a long industry tradition, and the intense physicality here makes it easy to compare it to a kind of upper body Dance Dance Revolution. But everything about it feels so new that this isn't just one of the best VR games I've ever played, it's one of the best games I've ever played period. It gives you a new way to listen to music along with a new way to talk to your own body, wrapped up with a perfectly addictive concept built around what is, at the end of the day, one single idea.

This game never could have worked anywhere but VR, but right now it's clearly limited by quixotic hardware that still feels a long way from mass-market penetration. Which makes its success even more remarkable, working with the limitations of the medium to make something succeeds not in spite of its odd platform by because of it. I get the feeling that fitness has a big role to play for VR going forward, because this is one of the most compelling arguments I've had yet for buying a headset.

">

Beat Saber

Credit: Beat Games

There are, I suppose, other games on my Beat Saber machine. Fruit Ninja seems cool, and there's some sort of stealth kayak thing I'ver heard people talk about. Maybe a boxing thing, maybe some stuff with guns: sure. I've heard that VR is a whole medium, and even one that I've spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the past. Oh well. At the moment, I can't think of any of that. Every time I boot up my Oculus Quest I see that there's a store tab that I should check out, maybe one day. Not today. Beat Saber awaits.

Beat Saber has become the defining game of modern VR for me and many others, one of the few true success stories coming out of the still-early platform. It's a premise so simple it really couldn't have happened anywhere else: you have two lightbeatsabers, one red and one blue. Colored blocks fly towards you with a direction on them: you have to cut the block with the saber of the correct color from the correct direction. And, as is pretty central to the whole idea, you have to do so in time with the music: and away we go. I meant to write something about this a while ago, but I had to play an absolute ton of Beat Saber first.

You get from this game what you put into it, and few other games will quite prepare you an experience like this. What starts as a simple exercise in the satisfaction of slashing something in VR ramps up at lightning speed until you're doing elaborate, whirling moves that long ago lost their connection to any lightsabery source material. A sword is a sort of visual language that a gamer understands, but it becomes immediately obvious that what you're doing here is dancing, not fighting. It's the sort of game nobody really imagined when they first started talking about VR, and the sort of game that feels like it's going to define the platform going forward. It doesn't ask you to immerse yourself in the uncanny valley or attempt to pretend that you're flying a vomitous spaceship. It justs asks you to dance, and boy, do you dance.

Beat Saber does that amazing thing that you don't encounter often in life: it's a little like learning a new instrument or maybe learning a new language. When you first look at the higher difficulties they appear as completely impenetrable, just semi-random masses of blocks that you can't ever hope to pull apart into actual moves. And then the magic of it: you do. Maybe you have to slow things down to figure out what's going on and maybe you need to play a little while on a lower difficulty until certain moves become second nature, but I've been amazed at how my brain and body have been able to pull this thing apart until even the hardest songs on the highest difficulty just start to make a certain kind of sense, where even seeing a big cross for my left hand on the right side of the screen doesn't cause me to freeze up anymore. A video game hasn't asked me to learn a new skill like this for a long time, and I'm so glad I did it.

And that's where the fitness starts to come in, particularly as you're swinging both hands in huge, dramatic gestures to something like Imagine Dragons' Radioactive: I've never been much for fitness games overall because I'd rather just go to the gym or something, but I do happen to love games, full stop. And Beat Saber never really feels like a fitness game so much as a game that happens to be intensely tiring. I'm sweating half of the time I'm working these days because I'm dipping down to the kitchen--the largest open area in my house--to get in a song or two before I go back to the office. My arms and back were killing me the first few days I played, but now I've got new muscles in places I didn't know I needed them.

The game has a neat little trick to hammer this point home: your score doesn't just depend on accuracy, though you obviously need that. You get extra points for the distance your saber travels before and after a cut, which in a simple way translates to more rewards for more drama. You can flick your wrists around and try to maximize your speed, sure, but I prefer to really start swinging and try to earn those points with the biggest moves I possibly can: I've spent most of my time playing the Imagine Dragons music pack, because something about that overblown arena rock just works so well with those big sweeping cuts. You may have heard these songs before, but Beat Saber lets you feel them.

Beat Saber doesn't come from nowhere: rhythm games are a long industry tradition, and the intense physicality here makes it easy to compare it to a kind of upper body Dance Dance Revolution. But everything about it feels so new that this isn't just one of the best VR games I've ever played, it's one of the best games I've ever played period. It gives you a new way to listen to music along with a new way to talk to your own body, wrapped up with a perfectly addictive concept built around what is, at the end of the day, one single idea.

This game never could have worked anywhere but VR, but right now it's clearly limited by quixotic hardware that still feels a long way from mass-market penetration. Which makes its success even more remarkable, working with the limitations of the medium to make something succeeds not in spite of its odd platform by because of it. I get the feeling that fitness has a big role to play for VR going forward, because this is one of the most compelling arguments I've had yet for buying a headset.